Charlottesville fake news, 2+ years later

Scumbag CNN

CONTEXT

The notion that Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, skinheads, the KKK, or any related groups who might have been in Charlottesville in 2017 as "very fine people" is false, thoroughly and easily debunked, as perfect an example of fake news as any.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: if that isn't fake news, then what is?)  Trump's statement about "very fine people on both sides," stripped of context, would appear to be some sort of dog whistle to these racist groups.  The full context includes not just the entirety of the press conference in which he said "very fine people" but also other statements made within days of that in which he explicitly and unambiguously repudiated - by name - neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK, etc.

In other words, there really is no excuse for spreading what is in essence a fucking lie that Trump called Nazis "very fine people."

It's a notion that took hold in the minds of vast swaths of the American left - Democrats, "progressives," academia, and media such as CNN.  And if you have any doubts that this notion went all the way to the top, just see what Obama said: "How hard is it so say Nazis are bad?"  (How the fuck can Obama not know better than this?  How can he not know that Trump explicitly, repeatedly repudiated Nazis?  This makes Obama a fucking liar, plain and simple.)

But what really pisses me and a ton of people off, is the likes of CNN refusing to own up to their de-contextualized misreporting - the spreading of fake news and lies.  CNN refuses to accept accountability and responsibility, indicating they think they can spread lies with impunity.  (And, yes, had CNN done the right thing and issued a full and clear correction, it would be headline news impossible not to have heard about.  All we have so far, it appears, is a half-assed admission from one if its anchors.)

It's one thing to spread lies and fake news; it's another to refuse to own up to it.  There's only one logical consequence of this: CNN deserves no credibility as a news outlet - certainly not when it comes to its coverage of politics.  The only logical question to raise at this point is: What else might CNN be lying to our faces about, this very day?

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (for one) has spent lots of time calling CNN to task for its lies, and CNN has chosen to ignore him.  Well, fuck CNN, then.  If they ignore him, who won't they ignore?  Fake-news motherfuckers.

But as I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt throughout many blog postings, this is a problem going well beyond CNN and applies pretty much to the entirety of today's American Left and what, to them, passes for decent and responsible discussion about political matters.  The American Left has become chock full of dishonest motherfuckers who think they can smear their opponents (not just politicians like Trump but intellectual figures like Rand) with impunity, and cry "racism" all the time with no consequence, and generally act like scum who have no business wielding power over others.  What's more, if they're not in on this scummy act directly, they are complicit in it.  If they don't actively take measures to hold the likes of CNN to account for its lies (while still rooting out every mistruth stated by their opponents, and screaming bloody murder when they pretend to have found something for sure), then they're partisan pieces of shit who also have no business pretending to act in the name of truth and goodness.

I hardly bother watching CNN any longer; it's quite predictable how its commentators will one-sidedly distort things (i.e., lie through context-omission), exaggerate the misdeeds of their opponents and downplay/ignore their own, etc.; whatever value it might have to offer I can get on another network, anyway; they offer no-value-added.

And that is part of a wider picture which I have also suggested before: the best (not merely good, or okay) minds in politics today have ended up being on the Right broadly speaking.  (Think about it: if someone like Daniel Patrick Moynihan dies and isn't succeeded in Democratic politics by anyone of remotely comparable stature, then where do you suppose the potential successor-minds have gone instead?  Suppose that the very best minds coming of age in, say, the 1990s make lots of attentive effort to sift through competing political ideas.  Such a mind would be carefully observant of the state of the debate, a meta-level observation as it were.  And what if such a mind is not only disappointed by what Democrats and the Left have to offer, but becomes increasingly disappointed over time to the point of being appalled at the intellectual bankruptcy a quarter century later?  What if the so-called minds of the Left nowadays consistently and unaccountably caricature and smear their opponents on the Right (and pat each other on the back for doing so) rather than engage in serious dialectic?  And what if those so-called minds, with increasing regularity, accompany their smears with hubris and contempt for their (imagined) opponents?  At what point does the best and most attentive mind stop giving these intellectual slobs the benefit of the doubt; how obviously slovenly and slothful does their behavior have to get?)  I'll add: those with the more reputable moral character have also ended up on the Right.  The Left has deluded itself with the notion of intellectual and moral superiority, which is belied the moment you get leftists pretending to debate the merits of opposing political views.  The likes of CNN are employing lesser intellects and more morally defective people than their competition.

(MSDNC is even more of a fucking joke; I haven't wasted a second of my time on that pitiful excuse for a news/opinion network in well over a month now; its commentators are obviously of a lesser intellectual and moral caliber, and the only point of its "news" is to propagate DNC talking points.  Or maybe it's just that CNN does a better job of disguising itself doing essentially the same thing; in that they would happen to be only more clever, but hardly wise.)

Even if you still wanted or hoped to trust CNN, to give it the benefit of the doubt, how can you?  If what they've done so far isn't enough to have squandered the benefit of the doubt, then what would be?

If "liberal centrist" Jonathan Haidt and his now-4-years-old Heterodox Academy project, with all its commonsense recommendations for how the Academy (and especially the Academic Left) might restore a reputation for honest inquiry, is pretty much ignored by the Academy (and especially the Academic Left), then what more do you need to convict the Academy/Left of peddling the equivalent of fake news and elevating one-sided propaganda over genuine dialogue, and squandering any remaining benefit of the doubt?

One thing the likes of CNN could do to restore at least a shred of credibility is to hire Republican fact-checkers on stories they publish that might so much as remotely suggest President Trump is saying something racist.  (The Academy and Academic Left could take similar measures in relevantly similar contexts, if credibility, contrition and honor are their concern.)  At this point the likes of CNN should want to bend over backwards to remove doubts about their honor and credibility, or else they deserve every negative tweet the president and others direct their way.  At this point, anything less from them suggests ongoing scumminess.

Trump vs. fake news, in a nutshell

"That is a lot of fake news back there."

Trump: "Fake news is the enemy of the American people."

Fake news: "Trump says a free press is the enemy of the American people."

Either you get what's going on here, or you might just be clueless/a Democrat.

CNN: "Trump's Racist Tweets"

Part of Trump's appeal comes from people's disgust with what he calls Fake News.  He has said things to the effect that "the fake news is the enemy of the people."  What do the fake-news outlets do in response, as if they were on Trump's payroll and going out of their way to prove his point?  They twist his words into: Trump considers the free press his enemy.

I've written before about CNN's outright, undiluted fakery when it came to Trump's "very fine people" comment on the Charlottesville incident, deliberately (how could it not be?) ripped from its context in which he was referring to (supposed) non-white-supremacists who were there to protest the removal of statues.  As far as I'm concerned, this and numerous other incidents lead me by cognitive necessity and sanity to discount, doubt or disbelieve things that I see asserted on a network such as CNN.  CNN has made it rather abundantly clear - especially after Trump's becoming president - that in its political coverage it is in the business of advocacy and not reporting.

Here is perhaps the most obvious case in point to date:

Now, Trump's tweet about the "Squad" of leftist freshman (freshwoman?) Congresswomen contained plenty of inflammatory language but the language the left/Dems/"progressives" and their media allies seized upon to the exclusion of everything else, including Trump's original point about loving one's country, was his "go back to the countries they came from" language.  Now, there's a case to be made that this "go back to where you came from" language is racist in content (whether it is in intention) but here's the thing: there's controversy here.  Trump's point - I assume his own perspective is relevant here as to what his point was - is something about the "squad" not being sufficiently loving of America.  This makes it a matter of controversy, interpretation and opinion whether it is appropriate to refer to the entirety of the tweet as racist.

If you don't see this as a matter of interpretation and opinion, then there's no point in my trying to reason with you further here.  As a matter of indisputable fact, today's leftists/Dems and much of the rest of the country are not in agreement on what constitutes racism, racist speech, hate speech, and the like.  This is precisely why the left's cult-like chants of "Trump's racism" are so ineffective and fall on so many deaf ears.  The un-deaf-ears they fall on tend to react in terms of how idiotic and ill-supported the chants are.  The whole process here feeds into a vicious escalating cycle: The left calls Trump (and a lot of other things/people) racist, that leads the opposition to be increasingly disgusted with the left, which increases the likelihood that the left will react with more charges of racism, and on it goes.  Observers from outside of this vicious cycle might note just what a stupid and indeed vicious cycle this is, just more of the same "politics as usual" (except it really isn't; the political situation in the USA today can be likened to a Red/Blue Cold War, when this hasn't been the case in the past; I'll just refer you to many blog entries of mine under the "leftist losers" tag for which "side" I think is way more at fault for this phenomenon, and I've grown tired of commenting on all the new examples that illustrate my point, the essential trend having been overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly established in any honest and thoughtful reader's mind).  (The only issue here is just how intellectually bankrupt the non-left is, compared to the left.)

Now, it's one thing for activists, pundits, and opposing politicians to call Trump a racist or to claim that he says racist things.  That's all fair game in politics and their arguments and credibility should be assessed on their merits.

It's another thing for a purported news outlet to throw the term "racism/racist" around the way the activists/pundits/politicians.  Given that it's pretty obvious that people in the country don't agree on what persons or statements merit being called racist, a news outlet should be extra-careful about how it respects and reflects such a difference of opinion/interpretation.  The charge of racism is itself toxic enough that a news outlet needs to take cognizance of this.

CNN has determined that it's a matter of fact that Trump's tweet is racist.

How can the producers of CNN hold such an opinion honestly?  And if they don't know well enough to know that such an opinion cannot be held honestly, that points to a different set of problems.  I'm going on the assumption here that CNN's producers know better.  They might try to rationalize their editorial decisions on the grounds that this is a matter of fact, that in the age of Trump matters of opinion need to be treated in some cases as matters of fact, that truth needs to be spoken to power, etc.  But that's a piss-poor rationalization, because of the simple confusion of fact and opinion/interpretation.

Now - and it would sure be nice if this could go without saying, but these days the toxicity levels are too high - there are clear-cut cases of racism and they could be factually reported as such.  But in the case of Trump there is simply too much there that's ambiguous and controversial.  I (for one) am not convinced that Trump is a racist, much less that his anti-Squad tweet was racist.  And no amount of cult-like "if you deny Trump is a racist that makes you a racist" argument from intimidation - basically an attempt to coerce agreement from a mind that hasn't been swayed by the arguments - is going to sway me from that.

CNN's dishonest editorializing-as-news seems premised on the notion advanced all over the place by leftists nowadays that there isn't controversy here, that it is a matter of established fact that Trump is a a racist, and that those who don't see it as they do are part of the (racism) problem.  This mentality sounds more like that of a cult than of a group of people ready and willing to engage in a good-faith, mutual-understanding dialogue with those they disagree with.  This cult-like mentality becomes more obviously nasty and destructive if it is adopted by a purported news organization.  It not only destroys or diminishes their credibility on this subject, but on everything else (at least when it comes to political coverage).

It's not even so much an issue of what appears on CNN per se, but of the time slots in which the editorializing (masquerading as news) appears.  It's one thing for Don Lemon in his opinion-show time slot to call Trump a racist.  (At that time slot Lemon is opposite Laura Ingraham on Fox.  I don't find myself devoting my valuable time to watching much of either show in that time slot.)  At least Don Lemon's show, or shows during his time slot, are marked clearly enough as opinion programming.   But it's another thing for "Trump's Racist Tweet" to appear in the CNN headline banner during The Lead with Jake Tapper, which represents itself as a harder news program.  (Am I wrong?)  And this is hardly one defining incident; it's just one that came up readily via the usual internet searching after seeing "racist tweet" all over CNN's headlines for days (so it wasn't hard to find a visual example with those very words).

Is it safe to say, then, that the credibility of CNN's political coverage is pretty much as shot as MSDNC's?  I mean, I don't even bother with MSDNC here because their bias is so obvious and the intellectual quality of their punditry so low.  But CNN still touts itself as "the most trusted name in news."  (I don't think so.  This isn't the previous generation's CNN.)  And none of this is to excuse the problems one could readily point to on Fox News (or, what doesn't appear on Fox given its selection of topics and facts to cover/report, a selectivity exercised by the other two as well).

Given all this, it strikes me as reasonable to say that when CNN has a banner saying or implying Trump is a racist, it is engaging in the very sort of Fake News of which the president speaks.  If there's one thing that Trump speaks about with credibility, it's how dishonest and biased the media coverage is.  But the reason Trump speaks about this with credibility, when he speaks about so many other things without so much credibility, is that this is pretty much a no-brainer that anyone can see (anyone, that is, whose cognitive and critical faculties aren't destroyed in a cult-like fashion).  So when a regular CNN-viewer manages selectively to notice all the examples of bias on Fox but then doesn't see the problem with CNN, we're not talking about an honest opposition to Trump here; it's bias and fake news/narrative combined toxically with hubris.  But one naturally expects better from the CNN producers than from the rank-and-file CNN viewers; so what's the CNN producers' excuse?

The intellectual quality of 'Right' and 'Left' today

[The broad category of individuals listed here would be something like "public intellectual figures influential on contemporary mainstream American cultural and political thought."]

For the time being, I'll just drop this list of names and then explain later how the collected efforts of the 'Right' figures can easily wipe the floor with the collection of 'Left' figures listed.  I mean, isn't it obvious to anyone who's done his homework?  (Hint: which side has more overall aggregate wisdom?  [For instance, only one side has authors of books titled: The Book of Virtues; The Road to Character.]  It's a no-brainer, much like how a Golden State Warriors team with a healthy Curry and Durant wipes the floor with otherwise pretty skilled teams.  I'm sorry to say that I don't think that the "left" side rises to the level of the 2017-2018 Houston Rockets in this analogy, because it really isn't close.  The left side is more like a .500 team pretending it's an .800 [66-win] team.  The .900+ [74-8] team on the merits would be Aristotelians-Randians.)  And we're not even listing the not-so-influential but some vastly superior libertarian and Objectivist thinkers.

(I am more closely familiar with the 'Right' stream of American thought and so there are more of them listed; I list only living people with one exception; I leave out those currently working in prominent government positions.)

Republicans / Right:

Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
Richard Epstein
Roger Scruton
Glenn Beck
Bill O'Reilly
Krauthammer (d. 2018)
Kissinger
George Will
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
Michael Savage
Ben Shapiro
Mark Levin
Dennis Prager
Tucker Carlson
Greg Gutfeld
Newt Gingrich
Dinesh D'Souza
Bret Stephens
David Brooks
David Horowitz
Jason Riley
Heather Mac Donald
Peggy Noonan
Dana Perino
Jesse Watters
Dennis Miller
Jeanine Pirro
Dan Bongino
Candace Owens
Milo Y
Karl Rove
Brit Hume
Jonah Goldberg
Pat Buchanan
Lou Dobbs
Ann Coulter
James Dobson
Michael Medved
William Bennett
Robert Bork
George Gilder
Charles Murray
Andrew Napolitano
John Stossel
Victor Davis Hanson
Rod Dreher
Ross Douthat


Democrats / Left:

Jon Stewart
Stephen Colbert
Chris Cuomo
Rachel Maddow
Cenk Uygur
Chris Matthews
Matthew Yglesias
Paul Krugman
Joseph Stiglitz
Alan Blinder
William Galston
Austan Goolsbee
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Michael Eric Dyson
Cornel West
Noam Chomsky
Jurgen Habermas
Naomi Klein
Slavoj Zizek
Robert Reich
Juan Williams
Michael Moore
Thom Hartmann
Jesse Jackson
Al Sharpton
Al Franken
Bill Moyers
Matt Taibbi
David Brock
Nathan J. Robinson
Nicholas Kristof
Al Gore


Independent/Other:

Jordan Peterson
Andrew Sullivan
Glenn Greenwald
Alan Dershowitz
Jonathan Haidt
Thomas Friedman
Fareed Zakaria
The Economist (no bylines)
Steven Pinker
Joe Rogan
Bill Maher
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Sam Harris
Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer
Martha Nussbaum
Amartya Sen
Judith Butler

A conflict of visions

Not exactly the same conflict of visions of which Thomas Sowell spoke, but it is closely related....

One opinion piece below appears at a section called The Stone at the New York Times website; the sidebar describes The Stone as follows: "The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."  We can safely take the opinion pages of the Times as representative of "left-liberal" opinion in the United States.  The other opinion piece below would find a home in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, which is fairly representative of right/conservative and libertarianish opinion in the USA.  The first is dated August 18 of 2012; the second, as if responding to the first retroactively, is dated August 13 2012.

(1) Deluded Individualism

(2) Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Regular readers of this blog could readily tell which article I think better represents (a) reality and (b) traditionally and distinctively 'American' attitudes concerning the relation between the individual, civil society, and the state.  As I have pointed out in two separate blog entries in the past couple years, the interest among academic moral and political philosophers as a group in the whole idea of individualism appears almost nonexistent.  (There are two academically-published books I know of from within the past forty years that deal to a great extent with the concept of individualism: David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, 1976), which can be found at many a good university library; and Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, 1990), which can be found hardly anywhere, it would seem.  [EDIT: Upon further search, there are volumes by Tibor Machan that cover individualism in a positive light.  It also turns out that there are a few academic volumes scattered about here and there which tackle individualism, including a couple significant-looking ones by philosophy professors; they appear to aim at debunking individualist 'myths' such as the view - held by whom, I'm not sure - that the atomized individual is prior to or independent of society.  Perhaps this conception of individualism exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of authors like that of the first opinion piece above and not among actual proponents of individualism?])

(As the first opinion piece would have it, the content and direction of here blog is not due to autonomous or self-directing intellectually-virtuous/perfective activity; that would be a "delusion."  The credit for all this is due to society, or the welfare state, or other external factors.  That being the case, why isn't society all perfectivst already?  What contribution did I personally make to perfectivism?  Jack shit?)

I've said on this blog numerous times that, as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  To ward off a potential misunderstanding here among those who might go out of their way to misunderstand: The professional intellectual "class" is certainly filled to a great extent with people who are very bright, and very virtuous intellectually: they adhere to rigorous standards of truth-seeking inquiry.  If the People as a whole practiced such intellectual virtue in their own lives in their own ways and endeavors, we'd be in a vastly improved situation compared to what we have now.  This is the goal I would like to see accomplished.  So why isn't the nation going that way per my dictum?  Well, the chief problem is how the intellectuals make (or fail to make) their work relevant to the People.

It's not like the American people are inherently anti-intellectual.  Rather, what you see in this country is a widespread attitude, more on the Right than on the Left I should think, of hostility or indifference to what "higher learning" is or has become these days.  I'll enter as exhibit B (exhibit A being Scumbag Leiter & Co.) the first opinion piece above.  When this is the kind of thing that shows up on the opinion pages of "the liberal media's" flagship publication, accessible from page 3 of a google search on "individualism philosophy" no less, what else are the People - especially those right-of-center - to think about the "liberal" intelligentsia?  What use are such authors to the People?  Are they fulfilling their highest professional responsibility to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge?

The feeling among many of the "higher ed" intelligentsia is mutual: a contempt for the unwashed masses.  There's a gulf separating what's going on up there in the ivory towers and what's going on out there in flyover country (where the folks cling bitterly to guns and bibles).  Whereas a genuine philosophical mindset and temperament would seek to facilitate a dialogue between the two groups, what we have here is a failure to integrate.  What's more, the intellectuals are in the position, as professional full-time thinkers, where they're supposed to understand the causes and solutions to this problem, and act accordingly.  (Or are they not really in control of this, per the first opinion piece above?)  So that's the short-short explanation for how the course of the country is dictated by the way the intellectuals conduct themselves.

What would Aristotle and/or Jefferson think about all this?

"Checkmate, asshole."

For Your Viewing Enjoyment

The internet seems to be getting more and more funny by the day (well, for me, anyway). I'll happily return the favor:

Couldn't embed this one, but it's worth it.

Ain't integration fun? :-)

Apologizing for Profits

A pragmatism-eaten apologist for capitalism might think this Chevron "We Agree" ad is genius:



Given the intellectual bankruptcy and cynicism of our media and political institutions, this is what qualifies as "marketing genius," and it's probably the best that can be done in such a context. Hey, look, we put our profits to good use! It serves the common good! Capitalism works! Here, listen to our enemies, whom we are providing a platform, and we agree with them!

Of course, Ayn Rand would throw a shit-fit if she saw this advertisement, and she'd be spot-on right, as usual.

Need I go on?

If Kubrick directed House

One noticeable stylistic difference would be the lack of shaky camera movements. How did such amateurish shit become part of the mainstream television aesthetic today? Why do viewers put up with it? (Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?)

(I've also noticed, production-values wise, that Fox News's "static" camera is much preferable to the "floating" camera used on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Hell, Fox News is simply better, production-values wise. For the life of me I don't know why MSNBC doesn't take some hints.)

America: A Dumbed-Down Plutocracy?

The Left and the Right are all about constructing narratives targeted toward certain segments of the population. The Left tend to be more self-aware about this; after all, that's where I get the phrase "constructing narratives." The Right usually aren't that bright. Their constructed narrative, after all, is that American Decline is attributable to increasing secularism - "turning away from God." Now, that's a really stupid narrative-construction right there. I'm not sure it's more stupid, though, than the Left's constructed narrative - in effect, that American Decline is attributable to a dumbing-down to serve the interests of a corporatist oligarchy-plutocracy.

The Left's narratives are a holdover from another religious viewpoint - Marxism. It's about as anti-reality an ideological narrative as whatever spews forth from the Right. Anyone with anything resembling a sound understanding of economics is quite familiar with the ideas of Mises and Hayek on the benefits of the private property, i.e., capitalistic order, while the Marxian-inspired ideas are against the Mises-Hayek understanding of things. So if you apply the neo-Marxian analyses to the current state of America - with its demonstrably-ill-informed public and corporate ownership of politics - you end up with the theory that this is an outcome of the capitalistic order. More wealth accumulates in fewer hands, which in turn fuels more pro-wealthy policies at the expense of the populace, who are further dumbed-down in the process, etc. This stuff is very cliche' and could fit right on a napkin just like the Laffer Curve (which is a truism, actually, while Marxism in its various guises is pure shit).

The basic reason we have what we have in America today is that people are often very pragmatic: they go with what they think is the best available to them, all things considered. The current set-up we have now, is what we have because that's what the American people have chosen. They do realize in a pretty clear-cut way that the current state of things is pretty lousy; they have a commonsense "instinct" that the politicians are totally cynical and aren't squaring with them; they have a commonsense understanding that their government has done things in their name that are not too admirable; they have a commonsense perception that they are indeed ill-informed but what can they really do about it? What better alternatives are there, anyway? In a country with a mixed culture - a product, fundamentally, of mixed premises - the best results you can expect will be mixed.

If, however, Americans were shown a viable alternative that's clearly better than the status quo, then there's hope for this country after all. They just haven't been shown the better alternative yet. That better alternative does not, however, come enmeshed in left-wing narratives about a dumbed-down plutocracy that needs to "go Euro" to save itself. Rather, it comes enmeshed in a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels. That means not fucking up a commonsense understanding of what capitalism, i.e., the private property order, is all about. It means abandoning the various retarded (usually Marx-inspired) notions that capitalism is, in effect, zero-sum and exploitative. It means actually embracing the capitalist ethos, while recognizing what it takes, intellectually, on the whole, to do so - again, a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels, which entails enhanced cognitive (and therefore economic) efficiency. Americans do want to think critically; they have the intimation that doing so would greatly enhance their flourishing; they just need a guidebook of some sorts that they haven't yet gotten....

(Next on my radar: the Right's obvious narrative failures - fundamentally, a disrespect for the intellect and reason, purportedly in the name of spiritual enrichment.)

Thinking in Essentials: Huck Finn

So some PC twats have determined that an original work of art by Mark Twain is suitable material for "sanitization." Now, how much of the national discussion has centered around the very premise of this sanitization vis a vis respect for the integrity of an artwork?

All I've seen is debate over a less essential, less fundamental issue: how we should treat the term "nigger" in today's culture. Surely we don't solve that problem by going around and censoring "offending" works of art, do we? (It's not hard to imagine how, if anything, this censorship would only add to the country's racial problems. That's if you take a long-term view of these things, rather than a pragmatistic "quick fix" approach which is all these PC fucks ever know.) And where is the uproar about censoring works of art, which should be the immediate sense-of-life issue involved? WTF? What have we as a country come to, that this is even a subject of reasoned debate and discussion?

The essential here: reject "sanitizing"-censorship outright, as a corruption through and through. If the PC shits can't even get that right, how can we expect them to get the daunting matter of race relations in this country right? Failing to respect an artwork reflects so deep and fundamental a cognitive failing that we have to address that failing before we ever get to the issue of race relations. The nature of the cognitive hierarchy and cognitive integration demands it.

Jeezus Effing C, people.

(Thanks a lot again, modern philosophy.)

[ADDENDUM: Yes, I'm aware of how Rand used the term "censorship," as "pertaining only to government action." Her definition has hardly ever sat well with me, as we still need a term to cover any act of stifling freedom of expression. The term "self-censorship" does make sense. Rand was, however, making the obviously useful distinction between acts of government and acts of private parties - one that the leftist PC-fuck types run roughshod over on the premise that private capitalistic activities can be oppressive. A relevant factor from the standpoint of force and legality, in this instance, is that we're dealing with a public-domain work, so the issue has to do with respecting artistic expression in a more general sense.]

On Being an Ultimate Blogger

Without people like Glenn Greenwald around, I would not have found inspiration to become The Ultimate Philosopher. Greenwald is someone with an (almost) unparalleled ability to condense issues down to their very essence. Consequently, he sees pretty much of all that counts as "mainstream narrative and debate" in this country as corrupted through and through, in some fashion or other. His approach to the whole Wikileaks/Assange farce is one such instance of this.

(From what I can tell, the very charismatic some-sort-of-genius-figure Glenn Beck is invoking America, Ah, America (tears) against the "threat" posed by Assange, nevermind what Judge Napolitano was saying on your very network not hours before. You know, America's News Network. You know, GOP figurehead Roger Ailes's brilliant Network-ized media experiment. You know, America and Democracy. And we all have a good laugh at that one.)

Greenwald recognizes what the whole farce the "left-right" "mainstream" discourse is in this country. The politicians are . . . politicians, you idiots!. You just can't expect to have serious, honest, principled, heartfelt debates from weasels, can you? Everything in politics these days is going to the highest bidders, and those very high bidders are the same ones running the media, so what better can you expect than the kind of media we're getting? There's a reason an Ultimate Commentator like Glenn Greenwald would not get any interviews on Fox News - because Greenwald is in the business of exposing in the nakedest terms the hypocrisy of our present-day political system, and Fox News is right in the middle of all that hypocrisy. Hence, The Media get the "Julian Assange - Terrorist!" discussions going. It's so obvious what's going on here to anyone who's paying attention. Greenwald, despite his credentials for intellectual integrity, just doesn't serve "the content needs" of Fox News, Inc. Network-ized, remember. Always remember that. "But how did things get to be the Network-ized way?" asks The Ultimate Philosopher, who knows about Rand and Hegel in addition to various and sundry other items of considerable interest and how they all interconnect.

Greenwald has come to the naked essence of matters concerning him as a constitutional attorney and a Jeffersonian at heart: the political system we have today is a farce of what the Framers envisioned for us. What we have here are two distinctive phenomena: (1) America, and (2) the political system currently situated within America. No one worth taking seriously is against America or at least the idea of America. But the politicians already know that and pander to that America-love to continue their farcical political games. We as a nation have forgotten the original lesson of America: keep your affairs from the hands of politicians as much as you possibly can. Rely on your selves and your communities, governed by some basic virtues like common sense. It's the whole notion of politicians as we know them that's against the ideals of America. But Greenwald also points out how the media establishment is in on the whole cynical farce, in which case the media as we know it - a vehicle of infotainment rather than enlightenment first and foremost - is also against the ideals of America, where the media is supposed to exercise an intellectual independence from the political system.

There's a way out of all this, says The Ultimate Philosopher. Does Greenwald see things at that great a level of generality and essence? Greenwald is describing the many symptoms of severe dysfunction in regard to his areas of expertise, in a better way than anyone else in his profession has described, but has he diagnosed the core problem with the country?

Is he aware of things beyond constitutional law and politics, such as philosophy or maybe Ayn Rand? Does he diagnose things at a level a philosopher would aim to diagnose it? I don't recall any time he has mentioned a specifically philosophical issue or demonstrated a familiarity with the great philosophers in his blog. He is just really good at what he specializes in, though.

What I'm saying is that my aim is to philosophize at the level that Dr. House diagnoses illness. Perfectionism and whatnot, at least on my part. (Dr. House is lost for the time being as a person, though; I don't admire his cynical-amoral methods.) Even if that doesn't make either of us popular or well-liked by the many.

[ADDENDUM: The mainstream media coverage and discourse in regard to the shootings in Arizona has been about as low as one would reasonably have come to expect with this country lately. The fact that Dingbat, a.k.a. Sarah Palin, is at the center of it all is confirmation of that point.]

Apollo 11 and Ted Williams vs. The Intellectual Misfits

The story of newly-employed radio man Ted Williams is stuff of the benevolent universe at the heart of the American sense of life. Contrast that story, however, with the blog entries following it at the Huffington Post link above, and you might get a sense of the very disgust Ayn Rand was feeling toward Apollo 11 naysayers when she wrote that most Randian of articles. (It might be outdone only by "The Comprachicos.")

One blogger turns the subject into a surreal joke. Another - citing "objective economic measures" - assures us that this glimmer of hope called the American Dream is illusory after all. (This particular specimen informs us that the media's treatment of the Ted Williams story is one of many "false, establishment-serving narratives.") A third points out God's role in all this.

This is what passes for commentary at the intellectually-superior-liberal Huffington Post.

Thanks a lot, modern philosophy.

Kudos Again to Greenwald

Greenwald picks apart a Nation article which cast doubts on the authenticity of the "don't touch my junk" guy.

It's almost like reading Ayn Rand dissecting all the conceptual evasions in a run-of-the-mill article of her day (most likely one attacking, undercutting, or impugning good things like capitalism). Outlets like The Nation are left-partisan to begin with, so already there's reason for suspicion, prima facie. Then come all the conceptually sloppy associations, "wonderment" passing as legitimate fact-based observation, etc. Hell, the Nation's smear-piece reads much like your typical hit-piece on Ayn Rand herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the history of the Nation is peppered with all kinds of sloppy, shoddy, awesomely-committed-to-misconception (h/t Michael Herr) references to Rand.

In fact, googling up "the nation ayn rand" brings up this incompetent pile of shit as the first result. See?

Obama vs. American exceptionalism?

Sullivan tears the GOP media establishment another asshole. Nice to see Sullivan in top form; if he kept that up consistently he'd be a Perfectionist!

Nonetheless, what's the Machiavellian Obama doing, setting himself up for such easy political smearing like that? Could it be his please-everyone pragmatism? What's the point of the first sentence in his response about exceptionalism, the one easily and readily exploited by an unscrupulous partisan media-political machine? Also, why doesn't Obama praise individualism and capitalism as central to America's greatness? He cites nebulous "core values" to America such as democracy (yay!) and the rule of law (yay!) and free speech (yay!) and equality (yay?), but nowhere do I see the words "capitalism" or "individualism". Why not? Is he afraid to declare these as the core principles? Is he ignorant of their being core principles? Would the boundlessly-intellectually-curious Jefferson, were he President today, aware of the obvious similarities between his worldview and Ayn Rand's, be so goddamn ignorant and/or fearful?

This does raise a core and fundamental question of the matter: with the likes of Obama as president, why should America be considered exceptional? How do we stand out, and in virtue of what? Is it in virtue of pragmatism and lack of intellectual curiosity and ignorance of moral individualism and capitalism? Obama only touches upon the principle when he says that only in America could a story like his happen. Why does he fail to explicitly and clearly identify the principle? He says America is exceptional, but doesn't really explain why in fundamentally convincing terms. Had he known a thing or two about Ayn Rand, he would know that by making watered-down and vague explanations for American exceptionalism, he fails to be convincing. People don't respond in fundamental sense-of-life terms to vagueness and pragmatism; they respond to clarity, principle and boldness. Upholding "free speech" as a principle without tying such a value to a more fundamental explanation of its rightness, is just to mouth an empty platitude. This is pretty typical for pragmatistic politicians, but not typical for great leaders (such as Jefferson). (As a pragmatistic politician with no fundamental understanding of what makes America great - and this lack of fundamental understanding is conveyed in conscious and subconscious ways to his audience - Obama actually represents something that should be repellent to his intellectually liberal supporters: a variant of anti-intellectualism. So much for the myth - initially a hope - that he could transcend the anti-intellectualism so pervasive in our politics.)

So, why does Sullivan fail to notice all this, in his smaller-fry campaign of taking shots at a right-wing media machine, as delicious as those shots might be? I mean, c'mon, if you're gonna shoot fish in a barrel, why not do so in regard to Karl Marx and John Rawls rather than nonentities like Charles Krauthammer or Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry? Lowry? Really?

The GOP: Truly Disgusting

As a hardcore philosopher, I have no option but to be a hardcore independent in today's political scene. I can't stand either the Republicans or the Democrats. Today, however, I would like to comment on the GOP.

Ever since the disaster known as the Bush Presidency, and ever since the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President in 2008, the GOP has absolutely jackshit for credibility as a major political party.

As a hardcore philosopher, I am also a hardcore liberal in the original, true sense. (Today the concept is associated with the term "libertarian.") It means that I have at least as much animus towards state power as many in the GOP claim to have. When it comes to state power, however, the GOP has absolutely shat away its credibility.

Supposedly, according to the thoroughly dishonest narrative foisted on us by the Republican Establishment (read: Roger Ailes's propaganda outlet, FOX News), the American People are fed up with government and, therefore, fed up with Barack Obama and his big-government ways. The solution, goes the narrative, is to hand the reigns of power right back over to the very same sonsabitches who gave us George W. Bush, Dick W. Cheney, and Sarah W. Palin.

If the GOP gave the slightest two shits about out-of-control federal power, they would have been calling for remedies to the war crimes of the Cheney/Bush era. But they haven't, for the simple reason that they have no principles whatsoever. The war crimes were committed by Their Side, so that's okay.

And let's not kid ourselves here: the GOP - just as with the Democrats - is all about serving the interests of an Establishment Elite, a corporatist oligarchy that is always looking for new ways to screw over the American People. That is how we got the fucking farce of a War on Terror that pours trillions of taxpayer dollars into the tried-and-true Military Industrial Complex with the taxpayers' fear-manufactured acquiescence. To sum up the 9-year-and-counting War on Terror: Osama bin Laden is still alive and sending out messages. That fact alone ought to be fucking mind-blowing to the American People.

But, alas, the American People have very short memories. That's the way of the sham that is human politics. Remember the GOP/FOX/Ailes/Palin-fomented paranoia as little as a year ago that was the Birther nonsense? All part of a strategy to discredit Obama and stoke fear in the American People. There is little doubt that it worked to a considerable extent. The very same GOP-voting crowd that believes in 2,000-year-old Resurrections, also disbelieves the evidence that Obama is an American-born citizen. This is the same crowd that turns a blind eye to America-conducted war crimes, mind you, despite all the overwhelming evidence. This is the same crowd - loosely aligned with the so-called Tea Party - that now professes to want to go back to America's roots. I guess that means shitting all over the pro-reason (read: anti-bullshit), pro-freedom philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, in the process.

This is what makes the whole Tea Party thing a sham. First off, the Tea Party phenomenon succeeds in conflating original American liberalism with ignorance, anti-intellectualism and paranoia. The American People - 50 percent of whom deny the reality of evolution in spite of the overwhelming evidence - supposedly want freedom from federal tyranny, too. The true voices of reason and freedom - i.e., people like Ayn Rand - get drowned out in all this. The GOP really doesn't give a shit about them. They will use them up and then spit them out after the election returns are in, so that they can go back to fucking us a la Bush, Cheney, Rove, Ailes, and Palin. In short, the Tea Party is just another cause for cynical opportunism by the GOP so that they might take back some power from the Democrats. Period.

The Tea Party, on its face, is a positive thing, reminiscent of founding American ideals. Distrust of government power. Advocacy of freedom from things like lawless torture and surveillance and people-killing wars of convenience. This also does not reflect maintream American opinion today. Mainstream American opinion is full of all kinds of falsehoods, lies, evasions, equivocations, cowardice, intellectual laziness, gullibility, inconsistency, politician-trusting, media-trusting, church-trusting, and any number of other intellectual vices. (For evidence: look at the completely stupid, unwarranted, and illiberal prohibition on marijuana, still supported by a majority that simply does not know any better.) This is what the GOP Establishment feeds off of, for one primary purpose: political power. The power to illegally kill, torture, and spy, and to enrich corporate sponsors at the expense of the people. And when it comes to totally credibility-destroying things like war crimes and the '08 Palin VP nod, the Establishment is full of nothing but fucking cowards who won't call it like it is for fear of alienating the voters/corporations that might get them elected.

Just remember this as we approach Nov. 2 and are told, once again, how we need Change in Washington.

Cowards Coalescing

The Rand-Evading Distinguished Professor links to a roundtable in which he is a participant, in the pages of the torture-enabling New York Times. From the REDP's contribution:

[P]hilosophy, like other humanities fields, is under attack at many institutions of higher education. This attack has other causes. The current crisis of capitalism has increased anxiety about the short-term “market value” of all courses of study.

WTF?

So let's see if I understand this correctly: in the pages of the New York Times, torture is now politely euphemized (at the request of the very lawless thugs doing the torturing) as "enhanced interrogation," while the current economic situation is not-so-politely euphemized by neo-Marxist twits as "a crisis of capitalism."

Nice, huh?

Moron Roundtable: The Hannity Show

In recent months I have done what you might call "opposition research" of the FOX News channel. There's one thing that defines FOX News: its purpose is to advance the cause of the Republican Party. Now, since the Republican Party is a mixed coalition with different constituencies, this is well-reflected in its lineup.

One thing about FOX News, BTW, is that it has excellent production values. Production-value wise, it is genius. The amount of American-flag colors in that channel's programming is staggering; it makes the competition look like a bunch of pinko commie America-hating bastards by comparison. I swear, you could get half the country to buy a shit sandwich as long as it's in a red, white, and blue wrapper.

So that's the FOX News strategy as far as roping in the Right Wing Coalition: just be America's News Network. The rest falls into place.

Oh, and the nicest looking lineup of female talking heads, headlined by the lovely Megyn Kelly.

The strongest voice on the lineup is Bill O'Reilly. There are a lot of people out there that don't get him. But Bill is actually quite good and holds up really well in arguments. O'Reilly's target demographic is basically smart, rich people.

Then you have Glenn Beck, an oddball case for a number of reasons, but basically a mix of quality and lousy elements. One thing I do know is that during the Beck hour, there is a "BUY GOLD!" ad every commercial break - and lots of other ads directed at old people concerned for their safety and security rather than things like investment potential.

I went for months avoiding the Hannity show, but I had to discipline myself and watch the train wreck.

And what a train wreck that show is.

My mouth was just agape during a whole segment, where no one offered any coherent arguments, no one could hear anyone else talking, one logical fallacy after another - just basically intellectual guttersniping.

I wonder which segment of the Republican demographic this show is aimed toward?

I would like to take this opportunity to mention a great alternative to this madness, what I would term an Ubermensch Roundtable: The Howard Stern Show.